Does anybody have an explanatory link?

[conuly]

So, responses here are not terribly helpful.

The OP is specifically confused about the use of the prhase "such as" in the highlighted sentence. I said that this is not wrong, it's just formal and old-fashioned, but like most Americans I've had very little formal education in English grammar and with google I still can't find either the words to define it or a few well-placed citations by prestigious authors.

Comments

[reynardo]

The "such as" is fine for me. My issue is the "open and close our sentences." I think the author meant to say "open and closed sentences", using "open" and "closed" as adjectives for the word "sentence", but didn't quite know what the expression is. (Maybe they just heard it without understanding it?). Thus they used "close" instead, then ran it through a SPAG checker. The checker, seeing "close" and thinking of it as a verb, thought that therefore the word "sentences" needed a qualifier and suggested "our".

So I don't think this was written by an AI, but I think it *was* written by someone who was grabbing expressions without quite understanding what they meant.

I have no issue with "such as", but then I am an older (*cough*I remember the 1960s*cough*) person who also was brought up on very British books and writing.

[ethelmay]

The author writes a column discussing one sentence by an author. "Our sentence" means the one currently under discussion, in this case by George Eliot.

[conuly]

Whoops, I see you're talking about the book excerpt.